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Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

Why another Dichterliebe recording? Because Gerald Finley has simply one of the greatest voices of his generation, and is an artist at the peak of his powers. He brings to this noble cycle the supreme musical understanding that characterizes all his ...» More

'Hyperion’s Schumann series continues to strike gold with a collection … that finds baritone Christopher Maltman on superb form … with this ...'This is a treasurable issue – generous in quality and quantity alike. As with the Hyperion Schubert Song edition one struggles for new ways of expres ...» More

'Schäfer evokes comparison with Elisabeth Schumann and with the young Elly Ameling, whom in tone and freshness of response she often resembles. In sum ...'Her voice combines ethereal radiance and clarity with resolute, unwavering focus. Johnson's account of the piano parts is superlative [and] his bookl ...» More

'Recorded sound is impeccable and Johnson's notes are, as always, a joy in and of themselves. Necessary for collectors of this edition, and for the Sc ...'This probing, absorbing account of Schumann's op.24 Liederkreis is as good as any you're ever likely to hear' (Fanfare, USA)» More

In the previous song we have undertaken a journey with no joy at the end of the tunnel. Gustav Schwab’s poem ends in disaster, although not quite the disaster which one may have predicted. Here at least we have a happy outcome. The theme of the wanderer and the dignity of the minstrel coincide in music of old-fashioned simplicity. Once again this is Schumann’s ballad style, straightforward in a way which does not fit with the febrile mood of many of the twelve Kerner settings for the Liederreihe Op 35. The appearance of the verb ‘ziehen’ in both strophes shows that Schumann here used Kerner’s Dichtungen of 1834, not the Gedichte (1826 – source of all the earlier songs on this disc) where we find ‘gehen’.

Everything here is dignified and courtly, a song for a gentle knight – an early model for Gurnemanz perhaps. If one were able to imagine the scaled-down proportions of a Parsifal in lieder, this music would do nicely for the scene when the old knight conducts Parsifal to the castle of the guardians of the Grail. The stately walking-pace implies travel, but perhaps not quite enough transformation. If this worthy song suffers from anything, it is lack of magic. His complacent determination to trudge in time with the accompaniment makes this traveller appear to be wearing a strait-jacket.

The despondency implied by the words at the end of the third strophe musical strophe (the middle of the poet’s second verse) seems too easily refuted by a new-found optimism. Perhaps Schumann should have provided a longer interlude here, rather than between the first and second verses. Miscalculations such as these do not seem to have pleased the composer either; the song was not published in his lifetime. Nevertheless, a noble instrument in vocal terms (perhaps with Wagnerian potential) can also do wonders for a song where the accompaniment is largely confined to the bass clef; the addition of sonorous brass instruments (again in the manner of Parsifal) would also help to colour the song with greater variety. This music has far more to do with the Wagner of the future than with Schubert’s Winterreise. This song is a very modest example of up-dated Teutonic minstrelsy. Trost im Gesang gives us a glimpse of Wagner’s portentousness without that composer’s richness of harmony or freedom of declamation. A nationwide desire to create music with a self-consciously Germanic weight and breadth already seems to be in the air, and Schumann occasionally allows himself to take a deep breath of the prevailing breeze. Some of the political issues which may have encouraged this are discussed in the next commentary.

The music is straightforwardly passionate (the marking is ‘Leidenschaftlich’) – indeed, its problem is that it is too straightforward. The sequence whereby the opening melody is repeated a minor third higher for the second half of the opening strophe is a stirring one, but the throbbing triplet accompaniment is commonplace in comparison to the magical rustling of demisemiquavers in the song which would have been its neighbour in Dichterliebe (‘Und wüssten’s die Blumen die kleine’). In the poem’s second verse, triplets once again do service for both surging river and flickering flame. The plain and simple style of Robert Franz comes to mind – his songs are seldom graced with preludes and postludes – but we would have expected more of Robert Schumann. And it seems he expected more of himself. The postlude, for example, is the palest echo of the ending of Mit Myrthen und Rosen. Of the four songs rejected for the cycle, one suspects that this was perhaps the easiest to put to one side.

The adoration expressed in this not-so-subtle music is so heart-on-sleeve and so brusquely masculine that it assorts rather ill with the rest of Dichterliebe, a cycle which keeps something in reserve in terms of its declarations of devotion. Heine planned the Lyrisches Intermezzo sequence to depict a lover’s progress from infatuation and love’s rapture through to disillusionment and desperation. And yet Schumann gives much less space to the enraptured lover (six songs at most) than to the jilted; indeed, we are somehow made to feel that the poet’s love is a fragile and fleeting thing, and that he is doomed to disappointment from the beginning. There is also the question of whether the lover is disillusioned during Schumann’s cycle, or whether he recounts his past moments of happiness as someone already emotionally wounded. The latter is almost certainly the case. The music and sentiment for Lehn’ deine Wang’ is too immediately passionate to suggest emotion recollected – an aria outburst that does not suit the rarefied air of emotional ambivalence which hangs over Dichterliebe from the opening notes.

This song from Schumann’s great year of 1840 has been relegated to the end of Volume III of the Peters Edition because it was never published in the composer’s lifetime. It has thus taken on the false appearance of a late flowering, a work which belongs to the problematic last period, and there is something about this shy and seemingly undemonstrative miniature which might support this misunderstanding. At first glance it appears dull in comparison to its celebrated contemporaries. Nevertheless there is something haunting about its simplicity which seems prophetic of Wolf’s Das verlassene Mägdlein, a simplicity which suggests the greyness and hopelessness of depression. Both of these works have vocal lines which seem frozen by trauma (in both cases the melody begins on three repeated notes on the fifth of the scale) and each movement of intervals in the melody seems achieved at a great cost of energy, an attribute which the depressed protagonists have in very short supply. This is music beyond weeping; sobs are either repressed or long since exhausted. In both cases the portrait is of a victim, demure yet heartbroken, and terribly wronged. Das verlassene Mägdlein is powerfully simple, in stark contrast to the complexities of the other songs which surround it in Wolf’s Mörike songbook—an obvious tongue-tied waif near to suicide. Schumann seems to be aiming for something similar: the suggestion of mental illness is very eloquent at the leaping seventh and dissonance of ‘Himmelszelt!’, and the repeated Bs which run through the song like a thread of neurosis, suggest the obsessive dwelling on one idea. The postlude, where Schumann suggests that the pedal should be held for four bars, is a little miracle of wistful eloquence. Herzeleid, descriptive of the mad Ophelia, is in the same key and is similarly unhinged.

The commentators have suggested that the work was never published because it was thought to be inferior by its creator. It seems more likely to me that it was not considered appropriate to publish because of the homely provenance of the words. Lily Bernhard, it seems, was a friend of Clara Schumann’s. Almost nothing is known about her (Peters has the author as unknown) but it is obvious that she was not considered to be of the stature to stand beside the other great poets of 1840—Heine, Eichendorff, Andersen, Chamisso et al. In this year, with a few notable exceptions (the poet of Der Nussbaum, for instance), Schumann mixed only with the very best.

Sams identifies two motifs in relation to this song, the first associated with the key of E minor and where the idea of three-part instead of four-part harmony (i.e. a missing voice) is associated with moods of loneliness and sadness. The second is associated with the falling of a flattened sixth back on to the fifth as at ‘Tropfen’, ‘Tränen’ and similar moments throughout the song which expresses the idea of acute grief. Sams cites the sombre pictures of Auf einer Burg and Im Rhein (from Liederkreis and Dichterliebe respectively) as examples of songs in E minor which ‘link up with another sub-group of motifs of twilight and reverie and melancholy, which has the common idea of a missing element.’

This is one of Schumann’s strangest, one might even say baffling, lieder. The setting is an extended one, concluding with Schumann’s longest postlude (28 bars); but it does not seem nearly vivid enough – it is too diffuse perhaps – for Heine’s text where the poet conjures his own worst fears of his lover’s duplicity, and sees them personified as mocking spectres. This is a rare case when a later composer – Richard Strauss to be exact – understands the poem better. Certainly his Waldesfahrt (Op 69 No 4) is a more effective song than this. Perhaps one needs to have read grotesque literature of a later epoch, above all Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, to get the full measure of the personification of evil thoughts suggested by a text which seems more modern than much else in the Buch der Lieder, possibly because it borders on a Freudian interpretation of dreams.

As in a number of other Schumann creations, the song seems to have been born out of a dreamy moment of improvisation, the fingers lazily tracing poetic patterns at the keyboard at a magical twilight hour as Heine’s words obediently rearranged themselves into musical letters. The image of a carriage rolling slowly through the woods is a viable one for music, an antidote to many a famous and over-energetic horse-ride in the lieder repertoire, although I would wager that no nineteenth-century traveller ever experienced a ride as smooth as this. Even if German carriages of the time enjoyed the advantage of nineteenth-century Vorsprung durch Technik, they could never have been quite well sprung enough to glide on the cushion of air suggested by this music. The fact is, of course, that the mind has the power to make a magic carpet of any bumpy conveyance, and the poet is lost in thoughts so loving that he does not even notice the stones and potholes in the road. The tranquilly resonating bass notes, and the gentle whirr of descending sequences in the eight-bar introduction, suggest someone gently dreaming on a smooth aeroplane flight. Just to remind us that the music is descriptive of a carriage wheel, we hear a circular group of semiquavers on the last beat of each bar. One is reminded of the music for the turning mill-wheel – also a quick ascent and descent of the stave – in Halt! from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.

There is not much of an independent tune when the voice comes in, but then one must have a certain amount of energy to invent (and sing) a real melody, and the singer of this song seems too lost in his thoughts to be bothered to do so. As a result the melodic line which descends in easy steps down the stave is a perfect reflection of the comfortable passenger who ‘goes with the flow’. The bass is anchored on B flat (the song’s original key, as performed here) for a full thirteen bars; then the ‘blumige Täler’ are glimpsed through the window with a brief change of harmony before the return to B flat and a modulation to the dominant of that key (F major). Internal vistas now replace external ones. The harmonic direction leads us inward to the intimacy of D flat and G flat major. The staccato setting of the words (‘Ich sitze und sinne [und sinne] und träume’ – the repetitions in brackets are Schumann’s own) is doubled by similarly staccato piano chords. This reminds us of the musings of Die Stille (Eichendorff Liederkreis Op 39 No 4) where the narrator also hugs to herself thoughts of her beloved. ‘It is our secret’ the music seems to be saying in both songs, and therein the sense of suspense as if something were being whispered in a confidential manner. Suspense certainly, but hardly menace. The phrase ‘Und denk’ an die Liebste mein’ suddenly reverts to a vocal legato which is full of lyrical affection.

There is now another eight-bar interlude (beginning in the new key of D flat major). This combines the already familiar whirring of carriage wheels in the right hand with a legato left-hand counter-melody which alternates between the tenor and bass registers- like the conversation of two characters, or the weighing-up of events first in one way, then another. The composer has abrogated much sense of responsibility for the interpretation of the song – the unhelpful marking is ‘Nach dem Sinn des Gedichts (‘In the spirit of the poem’, as if he assumes that we will of course understand one of Heine’s trickier lyrics) – but it is at this point that the pianist can begin to introduce a trace of menace into those left-hand interjections. They might even be made to sound like the stirrings of the subconscious.

The question is whether Schumann sees any real menace in this poem. We know how he played all sorts of supernatural games with his beloved Clara when he was younger suitor and she still a girl, and the apparitions here seem as harmless as their Halloween pranks. That they should be an embodiment of his own (or more importantly Heine’s) mistrust or loathing – a revelation about what he really feels about his potentially faithless beloved – seems hardly to have occurred to him. It is true that the tessitura of ‘Da huschen drei Schattengestalten’ (‘Es grüssen drei Schattengestalten’ in the Buch der Lieder) is suddenly in a higher tessitura and marked mezzo forte. This, in combination with the two-tiered left-hand counter-melody can make something quite mysterious and even alarming about this music. (The repetition of ‘Zum Wagen’ is another composer’s repetition which seems merely note-spinning in order to have a sufficient number of falling sequences in the accompaniment.) It is here that we notice that Heine’s tight metrical structure has been sacrificed to a much looser musical ramble. And now the setting of the poem’s third strophe seems far too tame. One would be more disturbed by a group of urchins making faces through the stagecoach windows than by this vision of supernatural malevolence. Perhaps Schumann really intended this last verse to be delivered in a fervid and terrified histrionic manner; we shall never know. Such an interpretation might be covered by the freedom of the composer’s marking, but it is unlikely that in this tessitura he would have imagined a singer being anything more than rather casual about these spectres.

The postlude goes some way to redeem the song, although it could hardly be claimed that it is a revelation of the poet’s (or the composer’s) ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ as Yeats called it. There is some wonderful musical invention here: a cascade of descending semiquavers in the major key (cheeky rather than sinister), beautiful strands of heartfelt vocal melody as if written for strings, horn calls sustained over staccato semiquavers, a new counter-melody in dotted rhythm for the rolling carriage motif. All this persuades us that Schumann the lover is full of longing and, yes, also prey to occasional fears and fits of foreboding. But the three creatures who have waylaid him are elfin leprechauns, not his own murderous impulses, and the sight of the apparitions has made him miss his beloved rather than make him realise that he is well rid of her.

Compare the song by Strauss – not normally a composer, for all his greatness, given to great psychological depth in the Lied. The constant switching of tempi (between ‘Langsam’ and ‘Sehr schnell’) is not the only factor which makes of his setting something dangerous and darkly sinister, riddled by doubt and paranoia. He also repeats words, but to a purpose, not simply to spin out an atmosphere. The first time we hear the phrase ‘Denk an die Liebste mein’ it is set lyrically and affectionately. But when these words are made to return right at the end of the song there is a tremendous anguished outburst on ‘Liebste’ ending with a more reconciled ‘mein’. It is a superb way of showing that we all have ambivalent feelings about loved ones; or nearly all of us. It was probably impossible for Schumann to demonise Clara (at least in 1840); and we realise that Heine had a contemptuous way of thinking of women which was simply not in this composer’s emotional vocabulary.